nent during the
season, and is utterly ignorant of all the _on dits_ of the day.

"Charming!" murmurs Florence Ffolliott with the interested inflection
of thorough good breeding; but her hands, lying clasped together on
her lap, clasp each other cruelly.

"Yes," continues her ladyship. "I knew her father in my young
days--Ernest King--the Kings of Essex, you know?" Florence nods
assent. "He was the handsomest fellow imaginable, married a lovely
Greek girl; and here comes his daughter startling the world with her
genius twenty odd years after my little flirtation with him. It makes
one feel old, child--old. I called on her the last day I was in
London, but she was out; so then I wrote and begged her to come to
Stokeham when she could. Now I must leave you, dear. What are you
reading? Poetry, of course. I never read anything else either when I
was your age and was engaged to Sir Harry." The bright, stately lady
laughs gayly as she goes, and Florence Ffolliott sits before her
fire until luncheon-time, turning over a dozen wild fancies in her
brain--fancies that do no honor either to the man she loves or the
woman whom she cannot help disliking heartily. But her just, and
withal generous, soul dismisses them at last, and she bows her head to
the blow and acknowledges it to be what it is--an accident.

That the advent of Hyacinthe King in their midst should have created
no sensation among the party assembled at Stokeham would scarcely be a
reasonable proposition: it did, and not only the excitement that the
coming of a renowned meteor of the theatrical firmament might be
expected to occasion in a house full of British subjects, but
an undertone of surmise, and some sarcasms, between those--the
majority--who were well enough aware of Roy Chandoce's peculiar
infatuation for the beautiful young player. The pair were watched
keenly, it must be confessed, but with a courtesy and _savoir faire_
that admitted no betrayal of this absolutely human curiosity--by
none more keenly and more guardedly than by Lady Florence Ffolliott.
Neither she nor they discovered aught in the conduct of either the man
or the woman to find fault with or cavil at.

Hyacinthe was quickly voted a "man's woman" by the women, and as
quickly pronounced a "thorough enigma" by the men, not one of whom had
succeeded, even after the lapse of fourteen days, in arousing in her
that which is most dear to the masculine soul, a preference--although
it be a mild, a